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Microsoft Hyper-V has slowly but surely expanded its footprint into the small to medium-sized server virtualization market. To date, its No. 1 competitor, VMware, hasn't focused much attention on this slice of the virtualization pie, instead concentrating its efforts on larger enterprise organizations. This has created an inroad for Microsoft, giving Redmond an opportunity to advance its platform feature set while expanding within a target audience where price, more often than not, outshines additional capabilities.

But with such a small sliver of the server virtualization market share, Microsoft has not had the luxury of a deep, rich virtualization partner ecosystem like VMware, and the Redmond giant has been forced to go at virtual management alone. Unfortunately, within the small-business market, products like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) don't fit the bill.

In many cases, the System Center 2012 suite has too steep a learning curve and comes across as too complex, giving the impression it was designed with a large enterprise shop in mind as opposed to a small to medium-sized business. That's a hard pill to swallow, considering Microsoft Hyper-V is geared toward the small-business market right now as opposed to the enterprise where VMware currently dominates. Beyond that, System Center is too expensive for most small businesses.

To answer that call, two third-party virtualization management vendors who've long been a part of the VMware partner ecosystem both announced plans to add support for Microsoft Hyper-V to their respective management technologies. Veeam Software and SolarWinds will join another well-known virtualization third-party software vendor, VKernel, on a quest to expand virtual management software beyond the confines of VMware and into a heterogeneous environment that includes Microsoft's latest hypervisor technology, Hyper-V.

Veeam Software

Veeam Software, a community fan favorite, is perhaps best known for its data protection and disaster recovery software, Veeam Backup & Replication. However, it's also making a name for itself as a virtualization monitoring and reporting management provider for virtual data center environments. As part of that growing market, Veeam said it will release an update to the company's management suite, Veeam One, which will include support for Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as other as-yet unnamed new features to enhance the product's ease-of-use and offer even more powerful virtualization management capabilities.

With support for Hyper-V, Veeam One will be up to speed with Veeam's Backup & Replication product, which added that feature last May. At that time, Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy at Veeam, told InfoWorld, "Hyper-V is pretty clearly the second most popular hypervisor on the market, and since it's a free product its market share is likely to continue growing." He went on to say that Hyper-V is the hypervisor his customers ask about most frequently, which explains the company's recent engineering push behind the virtualization platform.

Ideal for small businesses with budget and staff constraints, Veeam One addresses virtualization challenges with efficient allocation of resources, documentation of the virtual infrastructure, and management reporting for performance, utilization, and workload. According to the company, unlike other products that monitor only a few performance metrics in Hyper-V environments, Veeam One will monitor more than 60 different metrics. It will also offer granular alarms that pinpoint the virtual machine on which an alert is occurring and include integrated monitoring of Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs).